Hobson-Jobson

Recently I bought a copy of the British-Raj-era classic reference book Hobson-Jobson.

I was at dinner with my friend Pranav (who makes great videos that combine history and trivia with cooking, such as this one), and we were discussing favourite dictionaries (because, as I was telling him, K thinks it’s a bit weird and adorable that I have a favourite). I was describing Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Brewer’s for short), and Pranav thought I was talking about the aforementioned Hobson-Jobson. Hang on, I said, I thought Hobson-Jobson was a grammar reference book, like Wren & Martin.

Pranav enlightened me then as to what Hobson-Jobson actually was, which is a dictionary of phrases used in Raj-era Indian English, for the reference of the “Anglo-Indian” (which at the time meant an English person living in India, not a mixed-race ethnicity as it does now), which is, if you know me, extremely my jam. Turns out Hobson-Jobson wasn’t the double-barrelled author attribution (ref. Strunk & White, Wren & Martin, Fowler & Fowler) – said authors are Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell – but a phrase from within, a mangling of the Shia chant “Ya Hussain! Ya Hassan!” used during Muharram (more on the title below).

I ordered it forthwith, and it has since arrived, and I have been inhaling large tranches of it, and highlighting my favourite references. (The edition I have isn’t a complete one, such as this second edition further edited by William Crooke, but a selection compiled and lightly annotated by Kate Teltscher. If I run out of this one, I might try and hunt down an old copy, but this does contain about half the material from the unabridged book.)

The introduction informed me that Yule, the primary author, was in constant correspondence with the legendary lexicographer James Murray (who edited the first Oxford English Dictionary, then called the New English Dictionary), and Hobson-Jobson has lent a fair few definitions to the OED, some acknowledged, others not so much.

I’ve been particularly intrigued to discover “the law of Hobson-Jobson”, which is a specific type of folk etymology deserving its own category. The title phrase is, as I mentioned, a corruption of an exclamation from another language (in this instance Urdu), and Hobson-Jobson has come to stand for such phrases (loanwords) that are first borrowed and then phonologically tweaked to fit existing, if not always related, words from the recipient language.

Existing examples are the word “cockroach”, which comes from the Spanish cucaracha but was influenced by the existing English words “cock” and “roach”. And a favourite – “forlorn hope”, meaning “hopeless venture”, which comes from the Dutch verloren hoop, which means “lost troop”.

Back to Hobson-Jobson the book. I’ve been loving it, and could quote several tasty bits from it, but let’s stick to one for now.

I enjoyed finding out, for example, that “daam”, the Hindi word for “cost”, comes from an actual copper coin that once existed, but which since became imaginary money. Other terms for currency related to the daam are the “damri”, which was 3 daams, and the “kauri” (cowry) of which 26 equaled a damri. None of these currencies are now in use as anything but metaphor – “this isn’t worth a kauri/damri” in many Indian languages means something is worthless, and you can say “phuti kauri” (broken cowry) as an intensifier. A cowry is the shell of a mollusc, which we used to play with as kids, and which were used for street gambling.

Another fun detail from this entry is that 25 daams were 1 pice/paisa, and a taaka was 2 paisa.“Taaka” is how everyone refers to a rupee in Bengal, and it eventually became the national currency of Bangladesh.

But my favourite detail from this single entry we’re talking about is Yule’s assertion that the English phrase “I don’t care a damn” (and presumably the contemporary “I don’t give a damn”) is derived not from the curseword but from this currency. The logic used is fair – “I don’t care a —” in many European languages was followed by a small unit of currency, plus the phrase “I don’t care a curse” is a corruption of the currency unit “kers”. (And I note that the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue attests to the same etymology.)

The Wikipedia entry for the book notes that many considered the title a pejorative – rhyming reduplication is common in Indian languages, but is considered infantile in English. Further, the term itself came from two stock characters in Victorian England, Hobson and Jobson. One can make the connection between a book like this and the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue referenced above – more than officers, working-class English folk were likely to assimilate native words into their speech, whether it be from India or from Malay or Zanzibar, and this sort of work is as condescending to them as to natives of colonised countries.

This is a legitimate criticism, and Teltscher makes others in her introduction – Yule and Burnell would fastidiously stay away from prurient subject matter, and from religion almost as much. Plus they were less than fluent in several native languages and that has resulted in occasional errors and missed nuances.

The work is, in effect, a result as much of colonial condescension as it is of curiosity – but goddammit that’s why it’s fun to read. I have no desire to read a dry, accurate etymology (okay, I hear myself, I would totally read that). This is an authored work, with personality and attitude, and a soupçon of racism thrown in the mix, as expected from 19th century white men writing about a country they barely inhabited. But I love the idea of reading about my culture from the point of view of strangers. Sure, there’s stuff here I didn’t know, but there are also things I know intimately, and it’s fascinating to see someone describe them with attention, if not always with rigour.

And these personalities come through. I love, for example, how many of the reference quotations are from travel books, because Yule was a nut for travel writing. And as for the excessive decorum, here’s a bit from the entry for “lingam”, which, yes, means the symbol for Shiva, which also means “token/proof”, but which happens to be, in many languages, the word for “penis”. This is how far they’ll go not to mention sex.

In the quotation of 1838 below, the word is used simply for a badge of caste, which is certainly the original Sanskrit meaning, but is probably a mistake as attributed in that sense to modern vernacular use. The man may have been a lingait, so that his badge was actually a figure of the lingam. But this clever authoress often gets out of her depth.

The “modern vernacular use” referred to, of course, is the one for genitalia. And here’s the relevant quote:

1838.— “In addition to the preaching, Mr. G. got hold of a man’s Lingam, or badge of caste, and took it away.” —Letters from Madras.

Delightful.